Baby Blues

"Do you have children? Really? Why not? How old are you?" This is a common line of questioning from supernova moms to childless women who happen to fall into their bottle-wielding orbit.

Ambivalence about having children isn't a particularly welcome stance in this culture of childcentric übermommies, with their tangle of parenting accoutrements — nannies, twin Maclaren strollers, Tumble Tots classes, socially vetted playdates. Questions inevitably arise as to why one wouldn't want to join their Pampers-changing ranks.

In the past several years, motherhood has taken on a different sheen, especially among the privileged set. A very precise, smug mummy syndrome has emerged, leaving nonmoms vying for credibility in its Vuitton-diaper-bag wake. Because, after all, what are we if we can't join the conversation with our own preschool-application woes?

Granted, of course, there are lovely, well-meaning mothers out there who aren't judgmental and don't fall prey to the competitive culture. But it's hard to remain uncertain when growing numbers of celebrities trot out their mini-me kin for countless photo ops. Indeed, no one is immune to the insecurities bred by the idealized vision of mommyhood.

"As celebs have their perfect pregnancies in the pages of magazines, it seems like a trend, when, in fact, motherhood has been around for, oh, ever," says Momzillas author and mother of three Jill Kargman. "When the concept of an It girl was ubiquitous in the late '90s, it was all about the PYTs being fabulous. Sex and the City was all the rage, and being single and stylish was something many women could relate to.

"But now, those legions of ladies have moved on, trading fetishy footwear for flats to chase after kids, and it seems like everyone has a belly bump or a baby."

The cultural benchmark has changed, which is a natural evolution, after all, but why has the pressure to procreate reached what feels like a fever pitch? According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the number of births in 2006 increased 3 percent from 2005 — the largest single-year rise since 1989 and the largest number of births since 1961. In some ways, it's as if we've circled back half a century. "In the 1950s and 1960s, people believed that it was unnatural not to be or to want to be a mother," says Stephanie Coontz, a professor, author, and the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. "There was really extraordinary social pressure. The pressures were so great, in fact, people gave in to them."

But the dawn of feminism allowed for a backlash. Women burned their bras, became CEOs, loved men and left them — in short, they got liberated. Yet now, perhaps due to our increasingly conservative sociopolitical clime, something has shifted.

"There's been a reversal in the last decade from the valorization of the career woman," says feminist author Camille Paglia, "the sort of hard-bitten, attaché case in hand, making her way in a man's world in the 1980s.... Then we began getting this obsession with having babies, which I think so many young Hollywood stars pioneered to an extent that now it seems as if acquiring multiracial babies is a fashion statement."

The whole "baby as accessory" concept has been bandied about for a while, morphing into the idea that one isn't enough. "It's manifest in the status symbol of four-is-the-new-three megafamilies in New York, where just by having that many kids, it's like saying we have Oprah money; we can hack four tuitions, five bedrooms, the help, the life," adds Kargman.

The trials of raising a child have been superseded, in some circles, by inane conversations about the importance of, say, learning French before kindergarten or teaching a three-year-old about the finer points of making pesto.

Clearly, motherhood can be a divisive issue. And some childless women are as troubled as their child-carrying counterparts. There are now many Websites, coalitions, and blogs aimed at this demographic: No Kidding!, Kidding Aside, the World Childfree Association, and Childfree by Choice, to name a few. The proliferation of such groups has likely been born out of a needling sense of injustice, an insidious undercurrent in society that leaves many childless women feeling somehow diminished. "I cried the first time someone told me I wasn't a real woman because I haven't given birth yet," says Ji Baek, owner of the tony Rescue Beauty Lounge salons in Manhattan, who has opted not to have kids. "It was a really devastating statement. I would never turn to a woman who has just given birth and say, 'Well, you're fat and your boobs are sagging.' I'd never be rude like that."

But the baby quake and ensuing martyrdom of mothers, self-imposed or otherwise, enrage women who feel that having children is a choice and not an obligation. "[Not having children] is a decision that everybody in society frowns on you for making," says author Ayelet Waldman, who has been widely excoriated for her views on motherhood, in spite of her having four children. "The assumption is that you are somehow selfish because you'd rather go to the movies than propagate the species."

Nancy Rome, a filmmaker who is working on both a documentary and a book on childlessness, empathizes with the ostracized. "We're outcasts of society, of our sex, of our gender," she says. "We are doing something that is viewed as un-American, unfeminine, un-Christian, uneverything."

Yet there are some nonmoms who aren't fazed by it. "I don't have time to think about not having children," says Lisa Airan, a prominent Manhattan dermatologist. "There was a time when women had children because that's what was expected. Now we just have so many options."

That conceit prompts the question, can we have it all? Yes, there are pockets of yummy mummies who possess that patina of polished maternal perfection. But there are others who express quite plainly the hardships of motherhood — the loneliness, the sleeplessness, the adverse effects on marriage. "It's like in When Harry Met Sally ..., when Meg Ryan talks about when you have kids, you can't fly off to Rome at a moment's notice or make love on the kitchen floor," says Kargman. "But we're not very spontaneous about travel anyway and, like Sally, my Harry and I also have that cold, hard tile that would make that very unfun. You definitely have to carve out alone time."

In her extensive research, Coontz has found that postbaby marital ennui often ensues: "There is a lot of joy in childbearing, but marital quality begins to drop immediately after the birth of a child and continues to drop until late adolescence. That is just a reality." Baek, for her part, isn't interested in compromising her marriage or career for the sake of children and says, "I don't think you can have it all. I don't want to be a superwoman, and to me the most important thing is my marriage. I want us to continue loving each other without the stress of being parents."

However, some women's antimotherhood stridency can falter, leading to sadness and regret in later years. One wealthy Manhattan social fixture laments never having a child. "It's a whole other world that I will never know. I have nieces and nephews, and I spend a lot of time with them, but it still isn't the same as having one of your own." For others, namely women who struggle to get pregnant, being childless is met with pitying looks. They too are somehow incomplete, though not crucified for it. And so go the travails of the haves and the have-nots.

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